


until morning when we disappear

by Veletrix



Category: Dead by Daylight (Video Game)
Genre: Character Study, also brief cameo made by david, also first fic with the spirit i think??? hell yeah give me a medal, alternative title: welcome to depression central featuring beanie boy and ghost girl, anyway love them both so much id die for them lol, have fun, its three am and ive been listening to a lot of the birthday massacre, mentions of freddy and nancy, not shippy btw, tw for animal death, which means you guys get weird sad stuff like this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-29
Updated: 2018-08-29
Packaged: 2019-07-04 02:50:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15832236
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Veletrix/pseuds/Veletrix
Summary: He doesn't know why he comes back, it's no home to him.And it's certainly no home to her either.(There's a cat somewhere here, too)





	until morning when we disappear

**Author's Note:**

> hey guys whats up, its ya girl, with more bad edgy writing
> 
> unedited? you know it

He doesn’t know why he comes back. Badham has been fenced off for years--it’s meant to have been demolished but for some reason no one’s actually gotten around to it. He wishes it would be, and he checks online everyday for the news that demolition has finally begun. But every day it still stands, and every other week he still goes.

His memories of what happened here years ago were still vague. If it weren’t for Krueger ever coming back, he might’ve gone his whole life never remembering what happened in his preschool years. But now, while there’s nothing concrete, he gets foggy visions, vague feelings. A hand on his head, heat on his back, charcoal staining his fingers. It always comes with a scuttling feeling on his skin, like bugs burrowing in his flesh.

Quentin tries not to dig any deeper than he’s already been forced to.

Yet, he still comes here. Somewhere in between the mind and reality, whenever he can stomach it. He wanders in and out of old classrooms, scratches at peeling paint and testing his weight on rusty swings. He never goes downstairs, though. He never checks what’s still there. He doesn’t think about the black box.

Nancy has never come with him. She’s desperate in trying to forget it all. Any mention of the preschool, of Krueger, is met with a harsh, silence until he brings up something else. She doesn’t sleep much either, anymore.

So, he goes alone.

And that’s fine, he doesn’t mind being alone, he’s used to it, like Nancy. He’s always found it hard to make friends. Nancy, Kris, Jesse, they were his only ones. Now it’s just Nancy, and even she’s drifting away. Whatever ‘relationship’ they had, it never lasted. It just crumbled. But Quentin thinks he’s okay with that.

He likes the quiet, he likes spending most of his efforts trying to befriend the alley cats around the school as opposed to the people he passes on his way here. He likes being alone.

It’s been years since Krueger happened. Quentin should really start looking at colleges properly. He should really stop putting it off. Nancy’s been going to college, the one in Springwood, but he knows she’s been looking to transfer to one out of the county. She’s desperate to leave, but also not ready to leave, she’s conflicted, and so is he.

He rifles through a box of rotting crayon drawings that he’s already rifled through a dozen times. A family in front of a house. A cat. A bouquet of flowers. A red car. A smoky stick figure. Nothing new.

This classroom was in the back. He didn’t know which one was his during his time here, and he doesn’t feel like he should put anymore effort exploring this place than he already has. He doesn’t want to get too attached. 

He needs to stop being so sentimental.

In the back of the school. Next to the staircase that lead downstairs, its heavy door is dusty and untouched, sealed closed hopefully forever. 

Except, this time, the door is open.

Just a crack, but he can see the the sliver of darkness it opens to. The boiler room. Krueger’s special place. Quentin’s personal hell, the origins of his nightmares.

He places both hands on the door, and feels the need to push it close. But he stops, and presses his temple to the dusty steel. The cold seeps through his beanie, through his skin, through his bones, down to the back of his eyes and the depth of his mind. He needed this door closed, but something was making him hesitates. Concern. No, not concern, fear. 

Closing the door means acknowledging it was open in the first place. That sounded stupid, actually. He felt stupid for pausing. This is what he needed to do, this is what should come naturally to him, and it does, but…

He heard something, high and faint, in the darkness behind the door. It didn’t sound human, it sounded like--

The noise came again, and again, and he had to really focus on it for a couple seconds, in the cold, to recognize it as meowing. There was a cat down there.

He knew from previous experience that the basement only had two entrances (or exits). He also knew that the other one was closed, as he had to pass it on his way in.

It could be a trick. But Krueger was dead, why is he thinking that? Paranoia is a parasite--it’ll never leave once it’s found its way in. Krueger didn’t stay dead the first time, either. There’s one way in.

But Quentin was soft at heart, quietly self-destructive, and lethally curious, so he dragged the door open. Not wide, just enough to let him slip in.

He uses his phone to light his way down the stairs, providing a scratch off blue light through the blackness. It was a darkness with no hope for natural light, a darkness without corners or end. The phone only did so much. Even without working heat or power, and left untouched for over a decade, the basement still felt stuffy and warm, dust making him sneeze continuously and every noise echoed louder than the last one. He could still hear the meowing every now and then. He called out to the cat every time it did, devolving into a game of Marco Polo. But with a cat.

He ducks around pipes and sticks close to the brick walls, waving the light over every spot, up and down. There’s some left over classroom furniture dumped down here, piles of broken chairs and rotting desks, tossed carelessly like bare bones. He could hear them creaking, and something muffled, like a whine, but he couldn’t tell if it was the cat or the structure settling.

Quentin felt suffocated. He didn’t want to be here, his skin was crawling and his breath was shuddering. In and out. In and out. He sneezed again. In and out. He scratched at his neck. Blood under the nails, ash in the mouth.

His hand grazed some hair--no, it was just cobweb. He pulled his hand back.

The meowing was getting louder. He was pretty sure the cat was in the room he just went in.

He stopped. He thinks...he’s pretty sure this room led to Kruger’s special place. But maybe it wasn’t, it’s been a while and it was dark, he might’ve gotten his directions confused. He hoped.

He hears scurrying in the dark, something susurrous, and the temperature has dropped considerably. Sweat paints his brow, and he swallows drly.

He calls out for the cat again.

The cat meows.

Quentin pans the light over the room, and something humanoid shrieks at him.

Deathly skin, maggot-white eyes, and a mouth that gaped into oblivion.

The cat was in its arms, squirming against the glass sticking out of the thing’s flesh. The thing’s head twitched into an unimaginable angle and Quentin suddenly felt like crying.

The phone slipped out of his hand and cracked onto the floor. He stumbled back and feels something weave around his calves, causing him to tumble back.

He scrambles for his phone, and hears the thing breathing--high and rasping like insect wings. He flips the phone around in his hands and pulls himself out of the room. The light gives him flashes of floating limbs and a stretched face. It was heaving, crying, and then screeching. He tried to retrace his steps as well as he could in the pitch dark, with the walls closing in and the thing fading in and out of the dark around him. 

Through the door, in the blue light of the preschool hallways, he finds the cat limping against the wall, a shard of glass knotted in its back leg. Quentin scooped the cat up into his arms as he ran by, and the basement door slammed against the wall behind him.

It was silent. The dust began to settle, and Quentin felt the sudden cold biting his cheeks. The cat wiggled in his own arms as he tried to keep a firm, but painless, hold on it. He stops running, and takes a moment to pull himself together. 

The hair on the back of his neck stands on end and he hears something whispering in his ear--low and quiet so that he couldn’t make out what it was, exactly, but still enough to warn him.

It--she--appears before him. She was small, her joints cracking as her limbs twist about like they weren’t even a part of her body, and her hair billowed around her, dark fire from the scalp. She looked horrible and unhappy and Quentin begins to panic.

He tightens his grip on the cat and pulls himself away from her. 

He could run back outside to his car, but she was blocking the hallway. The only way out would be back through the basement, or through her, and Quentin didn’t want to try either option.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, please, I was just looking for the cat--please, I’m--just--please don’t hurt me. I-I’m so sorry, I’ll never bother you again, I’m sorry,” he babbles, slowly backing up away from her. She shambles after him, like a broken doll just thrown together by strings. She lets out a low, scratchy whine, and jerks her arms out towards him.

He stops backing up. She stops advancing.

“The cat,” he breathes out, “do you want her back?”

She echoes out a hum. It seemed like a confirmation. 

Quentin readjusts his grip on the cat, and swallows back dust in his throat. “She’s hurt...the glass, y’know, in...you...is hurting her. I-I have a first aid kit in my car, let me help. Both of you.”

She lowers her arms and locks them into a tense, twitching stance. She cocks her head so far to the side it’s almost upside down.

“Please,” he he says as softly as he can while trying not to gag. “It’s just outside. You can...you can come with me, if you can.”

A voice warbles past her rotting teeth, and her tongue lolls out of her mouth, thick and grey and dripping with blood and saliva. He heaves in a deep breath. It was getting hard to keep his composure.

She disappears in a blink of an eye, then flickers back at the school’s exit doors. She stares at him with iridescent eyes.

A good sign, maybe. He hurries past her, shoulders open the doors, and carefully picks his way through the playground. As he does, he glances behind to see if the Spirit has followed. She has, but she stops to mill around the playground, going around the swings and bending over the see-saw.

He gets to the rusty ambulance abandoned in the street next to the playground. Was this what he had used to get here? He couldn’t remember. The driver’s door was open, a medkit on the seat. He wipes the broken glass off it, and places the cat next to it. She lays quietly, only a soft purr to be heard, and he goes to shuffle through the medkit. 

As he pulls out antiseptic, bandages, and a pair of tweezers out, he sees movement out of the corner of his eye, goosebumps rising on the side of his face.

The Spirit hangs upside down in front of the windshield, her hair continuing to ignore gravity. Her eyes are wide and blank and her face equally so.

“It’s just her leg...she’ll be fine I think.”

The Spirit makes a bug-like clicking sound.  
Quentin pulls out the glass, holds down the cat as he applies the antiseptic, and expertly ties the bandages around the limb. It feels familiar to be doing this, even though he wished it didn’t.

When he finishes, he carefully places the cat on the street next to the ambulance. The Spirit crouches down next to the cat, her limbs splayed around her, jutting at awkward, painful angles, the side of her face pressed into the rubble of the ground. Her disembodied elbow floats a few inches away from her left arm. Quentin considers trying to put it back where it belongs, but figured it was best to not touch her without her permission.

The cat tests out her newly mended leg, and contentedly stretches when she realizes the lack of pain as a result. She purrs, and rubs her forehead against the Spirit’s temple.

The Spirit makes a jittery gurgling sound, which Quentin supposes could be interpreted as a giggle. 

The Spirit scoops the cat back up into her arms, as carefully as she can, looks at the cats face, and begins to cry.

Quentin flinches at the sound. It was like nails on a chalkboard, but more subdued. She seemed to be making an effort for it to be quiet.

He carefully holds up his hands. “Are you okay?”

She looks at him, her blue face scrunched up with dark tears, and begins to move her mouth. Her voice is cracked, and doesn’t seem to actually come out of her mouth so much as echo around her. At first, her voice was distorted and tricky, then he hears nonsense words, and then he understands.

“Not real.” she chokes, “She is not real. She has no fate and no home. She is lost and she is dead and nobody cares.”

He furrows his brow. Then the cat turns her face, and he sees no face. Just a caved in, bloody mess bordered by matted black fur and thick dirt. The meat in her head twitches in the moonlight.

The Spirit opens her mouth unnaturally wide, and she bites off the cats head. Then another bite, then another, and Quentin slumps against the ambulance as he looks on, remembering, suddenly, where he really was. The fog that haunts every corner, the burning orange light on every infected thing. There is no Nancy here, their neighborhood isn’t just on the other side of town, there is no other side of town, there is no town. His car isn’t here, but Krueger still very much is, somewhere. Blood sprays from the cats body and chunks of viscera sticks to the Spirit’s face. 

She’s done in a matter of seconds and all that’s left is blood on her front and dark shadow on the cement between them. The Spirit looks at him.

“Are you going to go home?” she asks.

“No,” he says, “I can’t.”

She screws her face up into a horrible amalgamation of anger and sorrow, chipped with longing, and she screams. Quentin presses his hands over his ears and curls in on himself, tears prickling at his eyes. She screams and she screams and it both hurts and comforts him. He cries in solidarity.

She stops, suddenly, and he looks at her. She looks at him. They both come to an understanding. 

Her right eye begins to spasm uncontrollably, and Quentin wonders if her eyeball is going to pop out of her socket.

“You…”she begins, then heaves, and starts again. “You and I...we must go.”

“We can’t go home,” he repeats, but more like a confirmation to himself than a reminder to her.

She tilts her head back and pieces of her begin to fade away. She pierces him with a sharp, sad look. “As though we ever needed to.”

He watches her disappear, bit by bit, and waits for the static in his ears to fully go away before he gets up. He goes back into the preschool, back through the basement and down the stairs, and keeps going down, and down, and down, until the darkness dies and the moonlight finds him.

Through the blue woods, he sees the campfire in the distance, and remembers why he’s here. As he approaches, he sees David sitting on a fallen tree trunk, rubbing the dirt off his hands. He looks up when he hears Quentin. 

“Hey, kid,” he says, “where’d you wander off to? You’ve missed the new guy.”

Quentin looks ahead at the darkened tree line. “Someplace familiar.”

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading i love my baby boy and my new wife sm
> 
> rip weird faceless cat lol


End file.
